What We Did Before Photoshop

June 15, 2012

Photoshop has become ubiquitous in digital photography, so much so that it may seem unbelievable that photographs have actually been manipulated since the birth of film. Photoshop tools such as dodge and burn inherited their DNA from black and white printing, as did numerous other Photoshop components. One of the most common forms of photographic manipulation was in the production of the “saucy” postcards of the 1950s. Here, a photographer would pose a model using just a basic studio set and props and then an artist would literally redraw the photograph adding backgrounds and even making the model look more saucy. These examples show perfectly the original photograph compared to the end product in the days before digital cameras and Photoshop:

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